Upcoming Search Engine Review 1: Searchme.com

Posted on | September 4, 2008 | 2 Comments

This is the first post of the new search engine review series.  I will at least post reviews for 3 engines that have been making news lately, Searchme, Cuil, and Mahalo.com. I know that there are a few more out there, like Redzee, Kartoo, etc, and if all goes well (i.e. if I am not lazy), I may write reviews for them too.

So, Searchme In two words is: its great!! Let’s elaborate..

UI

Searchme is a graphical search engine, which displays snaps of the results in a jukebox-cd-flipping interface. There is no doubt that the interface works. It offers minimalistic design, but with plenty of eye candies and a pack of features. Eye candies include a slider (yay!!!!), plenty of animations like the highlighting of clickable buttons/actions based on context, shadows for the result snaps, high contrast bright colors, etc. Searchme has certainly adopted Apple’s design spirit to the soul. Strange that  they don’t call the themselves iSearch.  Or did they?? Hmm…

Features

Searchme provides most of the standard features that you would expect from a search engine. It allows you to search web pages, videos and also pictures. It doesn’t seem to support boolean operators in the search term.

There are two unorthodox features that they offer. The first of which is categorical search. While you are typing search terms, Searchme provides you with categories of resources that are may help you narrow down the search results. Only categories that pertain to the search term are displayed. There are plenty of categories, including very specific ones like “cricket” (the sport),  and “mathematics.” As expected, if you click on a category, only results from that category is shown. Unfortunately, you cannot select more than one category…

The second feature is something that they call as “Stacks.” The idea is, while you are doing search, much like searching through your cd collections, you would organize the items that interest you in a stack to be looked at more thoroughly later. This feature is worth cheering for!! My strategy for filtering search results from Google is opening interesting hits in new tabs, and going through them one by one. Such a time and memory consuming mechanism. Searchme stack management is quite slick. You can put results in a stack through a single click, or by drag-and-drop. And to earn the right to be called a web 2.0 site, Searchme also provides tools to share your stacks with your buddies. This is really absolutely a winner.

Search Quality

Searchme claimed to have indexed about 1 billion pages, which is not a lot in today’s term. To test the search quality of Searchme and other engines for next reviews, I have created a small set of test terms in areas that I know relatively well. This include terms which are locale specific (‘bay area traffic’), time specific (’sarah palin’), industrial specific (‘open source esb’), esoteric field (‘graph partitioning’), and obscure (my name: ‘ezra nugroho’). In all areas, I find the results quite satisfactory. This proves that the size of index is not the only thing that matters in search quality.

Further challenges

The first one is obvious, what about support for browsers without flash? While the UI design was so Apple-ly, the site doesn’t work in my new iPhone!! It makes me a little mad. C’mon, at the very least you can degrade nicely. A text based degradation with “Stacks” capability would be very-very acceptable. However, I am sure this will get fixed soon.

The second challenge is probably scalability. I am not sure how computationally expensive for them to create and maintain website snapshots. I bet the fact that the major inhibiting factor for their small index is the challenges with snapshot. I hope they have a solution for this.

The last challenge that I see is liquidity. The product is almost mature now, but they’ve not have any revenue. They claimed that they have a lot of money in the bank from their last Round E funding, but that was 5th round with no revenue!!  I am sure the company is very attractive for acquisition, but that wouldn’t be really optimal.

Final words

Searchme is really a mature well-thought-through search engine that would easily win the hearts of web users. If you haven’t yet, give it a try, I am sure you’d like it. I bet Searchme would gain popularity soon. Hopefully it would start earning revenues to sustain and lead them to be wildly successful.

Comments

2 Responses to “Upcoming Search Engine Review 1: Searchme.com”

1. Cuil is not Cool | Luchita
   September 24th, 2008 @ 2:57 pm

   [...] did a few test search in the past, basically the same test set that I used to test Searchme.com. I found some hits that I didn’t find in Searchme, especially with my vanity search, and with [...]

2. Searchme in IPhone! | Luchita
   September 24th, 2008 @ 6:14 pm

   [...] my wildest dream, Searchme people read this post and answered to my request for them to support iphone. They did. Well, not that they did it because [...]

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